Pride doesn’t represent me

[Vegansausageroll]

Just been watching Joe Lycett’s big pride party.
It was all sexualised smut. It’s ‘furries’ , kink, drag, sex and innuendos galore. This isn’t all what pride is about! It’s supposed to be about our sexuality and our rights and not being ashamed of who we are. But there is no representation for young people like I was! I want people to be themselves and express themselves but it all just seems so extreme now!

I’m a middle aged gay woman. I like books and countryside walks!

I am very worried about equal rights and the way they are, once again, under threat.
I have nothing in common with the people that now dominate ‘pride’. The last woman’s group I went to has long been shut down, as have the lesbian groups I used to attend back in the day. I’m worried gay youth are being sent a message that their sexuality must be linked to a certain type of ‘lifestyle’ when many of us just want to live a regular life the same as our straight friends - the only difference is the sex of our partners 🤷‍♀️.

By some, not by others. But mostly you’d be missing the point of pride

Apparently the monkey pox issue is all the gay sex parties where 60+ people meet for sex and cause big outbreaks and that’s “normal” in the gay world…. This isn’t the gay world I know where people are in loving relationships of 2, going to the theatre or out for a meal. I don’t think being gay automatically makes you sexy crazed but maybe I’m wrong.

Celebration if the diversity of the community. That is what the Pride flag meant when it was created.
Yeah corporate marketing gimmicks are annoying.

It all seems to have gone a bit 'Julian clary' if you know what I mean- all a bit obvious and a bit pantomime. Whilst not gay myself I know quite a few who are similar to yourself OP , people who like cooking, reading, gardening and quite ordinary lifestyles - I guess representing people like yourself isn't so 'glamorous' or colourful and doesn't photograph so well. I think pride is only representing a certain proportion of the LGBT population.

If I'm not explaining myself properly - my problem is with others almost taking the Micky out of pride whilst supporting it! It seemed wrong! Surely the way to support pride is to have an office that's INCLUSIVE of LGTQ+ people fullstop?

It is not Pride. It is the media's representation of Pride.

It isn't. It used to be that, but it isn't now. Which is exactly the point the op is making.

First Lobby Lud reference I have ever seen on MN and I am here for it!

Exactly my point too. It’s not just a generational thing either, there are plenty of old gay guys who can easily snort todays youth under the table and out drink the lot of them. Pride is just a component of gay culture, it doesn’t represent them all just as Love Island doesn’t represent every straight 19-29 year old.

YANBU, OP.

Pride is now actually more of a threat to LGB rights than supportive.

Why would Chag be missing the point of Pride by protesting for lesbian women?

Marsha P. Johnson explicitly called himself a transvestite when he started the activist group S.T.A.R. with his friend Sylvia Rivera - Street Transvestites Action Group. He admitted on a later tv interview that he didn't get to the riots until about 3am, long after it started, and chided Rivera in the same interview that he hadn't turned up until two nights later (Rivera shamefacedly giggled and admitted it).

So much for the sainted trans revolutionaries who started the riots.

YANBU. Most my gay/lesbian friends are very normal people who just happen to be married to someone of the same sex. I don’t see that in the pride stuff.

I have also distanced myself from pride, agree with you completely.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we are edging ever closer to WW3 and the decadent West edges more towards Sodom and Gomorrah - go figure.

Well, to the extent that a certain cohort of trans women seems set on erasing the boundaries of lesbians and their right to exist, then yes, the trans handmaidens here are being homophobic.

It’s just a silly party festival that’s got overly commercialised. The only thing it represents is itself. I think it’s ok to be that and still have a serious message though. Like Christmas, the message is there, you just have to dig deep through the commercialised tat to find it.

Oh, I see, Eyerollsi. You're here to lecture the lesbians and bisexual women on inclusivity.

Yes because, historically, younger generations have never got swept along in a political movement that has resulted in horrific consequences…

I used to take DD to watch the parade which was fin and colourful and friendly but then stopped the year that some of it was so blatantly family unfriendly I was horrified. BDSM stuff out on the street in front of children.. if there was a Heterosexual parade with that sort of thing there would be outrage. I was having to answer questions about men on leads complete woth collars and some kind of leather head / face covering.. stuff I'm not familiar with myself let alone want to explain to children. there were other disturbing things too..but trauma has wiped them clean

Antelopevalley- I first went to London 1987. Although i haven't been to London in a long time, my main reference is the Cardiff marches, which progressed into Mardi Gras late Nineties and now are pride Cymru festival. And yes- the fellas in chaps etc WERE always there. But as I said with each passing year those were more and more, and expanded to the gimp masks, the dogs, the furries etc etc (and to my eye fewer and fewer lesbians or women at all) in my community where acceptance is a thin veil, that escalation into fetish only served to confirm homophobic prejudices. I can only speak for my own anecdotal evidence- but I'm from a valley town, where the terms gay and queer are still used as an insult . I'm one of six gays in my village. And what pride has become hasn't done me any favours. But what it was, DID. As someone else said, the community has changed such that I'm going back in. Back to the closet. And I think that's true of many of us.

‘Most my gay/lesbian friends are very normal people who just happen to be married to someone of the same sex. I don’t see that in the pride stuff.’

most of the people at Pride are just very normal people, very normal gay people. You don’t see that in ‘the pride Stuff’ because your looking at a handful of photos or watching a tv programme like Joe Lycetts that shows one very small ( but interesting? Shocking? Extreme? Over the top? ) depiction.
I would say you should come to a Pride March but we have more than enough straight people, too many, there as it is now that Pride is trendy.

And I'm not trying to 'erase the identity of others', just to get the bloody story straight by citing the actual words of the actual people involved, shorn of the myth-making fictions bolted on by transactivists retrospectively. Amazing how Storme DeLarverie, who by every single account was there from the beginning and was probably the butch lesbian whose resistance did start the riot, is always completely erased. Go and look her up, you might learn something about a lesbian to be proud of..